Google Analytics Cookie Cruncher exposes your online activities

When you need to learn more about websites someone is invited (you want if ensure that your children have not been loitering on the dark side of the canvas, say) and then checking their cookies has always been an option. But the information you have is often very limited, perhaps just for a domain name and therefore will always be useful.

Google Analytics Cookie Cruncher might be able to help, even if by focusing on Google Analytics cookies. These contain much more data, and in a standard format, so with just a bit of work you may be able to see the sites someone has traveled, the keywords used to locate them, the date and time of these last two visits and the number of times where a site has been visited in total.

To give it a try, first download the file (it's a simple 562 KB), unzip it and run GA Cruncher.exe Cookie (it is portable, there is no installation required).

Then choose the browser that you want to verify (IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari are supported).

You will need to then steer the program to the cookies to the browser. A help pane tells you where normally the relevant folder which is very convenient (although it would have been even better if the program had defaulted at this location, in the first place).

Finally, choose a location for your reports, click on the process, and in a second or two you should have (probably) three CSV files with the details of the story of cookie for this browser (IE on our test system product, IE_utma.csv, IE_utmb.csv and IE_utmz.csv, for example the audit files).

Technical follow-up go, this obviously has major limitations. If your username removes or modifies their cookies, uses the private browsing or just visit sites that use Google Analytics so it won't tell you anything.

If you are watching less-technical users, well that – or you are looking for just for any information you can find on their web activities - then Google Analytics Cookie Cruncher can be a useful way to discover a bit of additional Internet history.

Photo credit: gcpics/Shutterstock

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